The exhibition game of the 2025 season of professional baseball, which signals spring, will begin.
This year's exhibition games will be held from the 8th to the 18th, with a total of 50 games per team, and both the rules and rules introduced from the new season will be applied.
The opening game of the exhibition game will be held with KIA Tigers-Lotte Giants (Sajik Stadium in Busan), LG Twins-kt wiz (Suwon KT Wiz Park), Doosan Bears-Hanwha Eagles (Cheongju Stadium), SSG Landers-Samsung Lions (Daegu Samsung Lions Park), and Kiwoom Heroes-NC Dinos (Changwon NC Park) match, starting at 1 p.m.
Hanwha's historic first game at Hanwha Life Ball Park in Daejeon is against Samsung on the 17th and 18th.
Daejeon Hanwha Life Ball Park, which began construction in 2022 and was completed on the 28th of last month, is an asymmetric stadium with 99m on the left and 95m on the right.
It is expected to provide baseball fans with a new attraction with an 8-meter-high "Monster Wall" instead of the shortest among domestic baseball stadiums that reach the right fence.
The biggest change in this year's exhibition game is the full-scale degree of pitch clock.
The pitch clock was first introduced by the U.S. Major League Baseball (MLB) and will be expanded to international competitions such as the World Baseball Classic (WBC) next year.
Peach Clocks, which aims to shorten the game time to show fans a thrilling game, reduced the time of last year's exhibition game by 24 minutes.
Peach Clocks, which was piloted last year, will apply "pitching within 20 seconds when there is no runner and within 25 seconds when there is a runner" starting this year.
Batters must be at-bat within 33 seconds, and timeouts per at-bat are allowed twice.
If this is violated, the pitcher will be sanctioned with a ball and the batter will be sanctioned with a strike.
However, unlike MLB, it has decided not to put a restriction on the departure of the pitching board.
The inning shift time increased from the current 2 minutes to 2 minutes and 10 seconds, and the pitcher replacement time during the inning was moved by 10 seconds from 2 minutes and 20 seconds to 2 minutes and 10 seconds.
The automatic pitching determination system (ABS), which has been applied since last year, is adjusted and applied according to on-site opinions.
ABS applied 56.35% of the top and 27.64% of the bottom in proportion to the height of the batter last season, but this year, both the top and bottom will be lowered by 0.6%.
Accordingly, based on a 180cm tall batter, the strike zone goes down about 1cm.
Both affiliated and nurturing players can participate in the exhibition game, and there is no limit on the number of participants.
In principle, all exhibition games start at 1 p.m., but kt-NC (Changwon) and Kiwoom-SSG (Incheon) on the 13th and kt-Lotte (Busan) on the 15th will start at 6 p.m. to adapt to the night game.
From this season's regular season, overtime will be reduced from 12th to 11th, and there will be no overtime, doubleheader and cancellation game reorganization for exhibition games.
Video readings can be applied twice for each team, and one more time is added when the decision is overturned twice in a row.
Last chance to check your power ahead of the opening
There is no correlation between exhibition games and regular season performance.
The last time the No. 1 team in the exhibition game ranked first in the regular season and won the Korean Series trophy was in the 2007 season (SK Wyverns, current SSG Landers) 18 years ago.
In the past 20 years, LG (2006), KT (2017), and Hanwha (2021) have ranked at the bottom of the regular season.
Each club should make the final preparation for the 144 regular season rather than winning or losing in the exhibition game.
Pitchers representing the team focus on restoring their sense of play in preparation for the new season instead of all-out throws.
However, rookie players must be impressed in the exhibition game to compete for survival in order to join the opening entry.
In addition, teams with injury variables during spring camp must fill the last spot in the exhibition game.
LG, which is uncertain whether closer Jang Hyun-sik will join the opening game due to an ankle injury during the camp, will check the possibility of replacing rookie Kim Young-woo, while Samsung, whose starting pitcher Denny Reyes and must-winner Kim Moo-shin (former Kim Yoon-soo) have left due to injury, plans to fill the vacancy through exhibition games.
SSG, which returned home early after starting pitcher Mitch White and outfielder Ha Jae-hoon were injured, also needs to find a replacement in the exhibition game.
The 10 professional baseball teams will return home one after another from the 4th to the 6th after the spring camp to prepare for the opening of exhibition games on the 8th.
Doosan and Hanwha will return first on the 4th, and seven clubs from Kiwoom, NC, Samsung, Lotte, LG, SSG and KIA will return home on the 5th. 바카라
Finally, when KT returns home on the 6th, the spring camp in 2025 will be completely over and the start of professional baseball will begin to count down.
2025 KBO exhibition game schedule (8-18th)